If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade this month, Women’s March president Rachel Carmona has threatened that “for the women of this country, this will be a summer of rage” and that “we will be ungovernable.”
Regrettably, the abandonment of essential moral principles such as the right to life may become the turning point where angry and irrational democratic majorities deteriorate into mob rule.
But in our hearts, we all know that no amount of violence or protest can make what is wrong into a right. The deliberate killing of an innocent human being in her or his mother’s womb can never be a human right.
Essential principles — the foundation of rights
The United States was founded on a bedrock of essential, unalterable principles, first articulated in the Declaration of Independence and reaffirmed in the Constitution.
These principles were identified at the time of agreement as natural law rights recognized through reason to be inalienable and applicable across time and events.
The obligation to uphold the right to life pre-exists the Constitution and was understood by the Founders to be a permanent principle not amenable to alteration by either electoral or judicial majorities.
The Federal Convention of 1787 established two basic rules in the drawing up of the Constitution:
1. “To insert essential principles only, lest the operations of government should be clogged by rendering those provisions permanent and unalterable, which ought to be accomodated to times and events.” And
Should Roe v. Wade be overturned?
2. “To use simple and precise language, and general propositions.”
Accordingly, it is not within the authority of democratic or judicial majorities to abrogate or constrict the essential right to life principle originally honored as permanent and unalterable in the Declaration of Independence and throughout the founding of the republic.
Denying the “permanent and unalterable” right to life
It is to this first principle — the right to life — that current pro-abortion legislation in the U.S. has failed to give proper value.
The right to life was recognized by the Founders and the framers of the Constitution as one that belongs to that class of law that is “permanent and unalterable,” that has peremptory force, remains self-executing and cannot be abrogated by positivist laws seeking superficial “accommodation to time and events” (Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Vol. 2, Section 4).
The Supreme Court progressives have failed to give due consideration to the original “simple and precise language” of the Founders. They have distorted the intent and legislative history of the right to life norm as recognized in our founding instruments, the Declaration and the Constitution.
The impressive and enduring wisdom of the Founders of the United States of America and of the best of the statesmen and justices of that first century of the republic is still accessible for all of us who read and reread their letters, their writings and their speeches.
We all should come to appreciate these deep-thinking and intellectually valiant Americans and the mainly British philosophers and jurists from whom they learned the language of law. It is a tribute to their diligence that the Constitution still stands tall in the world today as a bulwark of justice and truth.
Roe’s discreditable disfigurement of the Constitution
It remains an indefensible betrayal of this constitutional heritage that imprudent and negligent Supreme Court majorities have allowed an egregious invention — so-called abortion “rights” — to stand without correction for 49 years.
The putative right to kill members of our posterity because they were dubbed in 1973 as “not persons in the whole sense” has no basis whatsoever in the text or the legal philosophy of the Constitution.
Since Roe v. Wade, over 63 million children in the United States of America have been deliberately and “lawfully” killed in the womb by their mothers’ abortionists. (The current euphemism “abortion provider” deserves to be rejected on the grounds of deception. We would not call paid killers “assassination providers” under the pretense that they are providing a benign service for their clients.)
Reaching up to “the eternal principles of the Supreme Court of heaven”
Roe v. Wade will never be settled law.
Principled opposition to this aberrant decision continues to grow as the death toll mounts for the smallest human beings.
Criticizing support for the notorious Dred Scott decision adopted at the Democratic Party convention assembled at Baltimore in 1860, A.R. Howbert in his “Reminisces of the War” (1888) observed:
“Human oppression and injustice can never be sanctified, even by the Supreme Court of the United States. Nothing is ever settled until it is settled right — settled in accordance with the eternal principles of the Supreme Court of heaven.”
It’s time for us all to reach for and honor those eternal principles.
Let’s accept and treasure each and every human being gifted to us by nature’s God. Let’s restore respect and protection for every one of the smallest human beings at that initial time of life and in that carefully prepared place — our mother’s womb.
Let’s reach out to love and help all mothers, everywhere and always.
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